The employment of microcellular techniques has become a common and essential method to counter capacity, spectrum efficiency and better indoor penetration issues. Due to the guiding effect of streets, microcellular systems always give long coverage tails. The long coverage tails can potentially force frequent unnecessary handovers when the mobiles cross the street intersections. In order to prevent or to reduce the occurrence of such unnecessary handovers in a microcellular system, new handover algorithms are required. In order to develop a new algorithm for unnecessary handover prevention in a microcellular system, comprehensive investigations have been conducted in this report. The investigations include the study of new algorithms proposed for microcellular systems, the study of handover algorithms specified in GSM specifications, the study of radio wave propagation characteristics in dense urban microcellular environment, and the study of coverage tail characteristics by analysing the data collected from a real-life Personal Communication Network (PCN) microcellular system in Hong Kong. The coverage tail characteristic analysis is conducted based on some real-life PCN microcellular system data collected at a cross-junction and a T-junction. Based on the results, a new handover algorithm, called Unnecessary Handover Prevention (UHP) Algorithm, is developed to prevent unnecessary handovers when mobile stations (MS) cross the coverage tails in microcellular systems. The new algorithm can also counteract the street corner loss effect when a MS turns at the junctions. In order to investigate the performance of the UHP algorithm, simulation has been done on the data collected at the cross-junction and the T-junction.